When I was younger, I always appreciated how Aaron Swartz (RIP) would compile a list of his yearly reading, along with brief blurbs and recommendations amongst them.

This year was probably my most productive in reading since high school, so I thought it would be worthwhile to tackle the project myself. As with last year, most of my reading was history, with a special interest in nuclear weapon policy and the build-up and maintenance of the national security state.

For me, ’50s through ’70s are the sweet spot—sharing enough concerns with the present that I find them vivid and relevant. After that it starts to get a little more emotionally charged and unpleasant, especially for stuff I remember being frustrated by at the time!

If you’re interested in my other reading history—or want to read the longer reviews I dashed out after finishing each book—you can check out my Goodreads page (or my The Story Graph profile).

(Following Aaron’s example, I’m bolding the especially-recommended reads.)

1. Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen
   • Pretty daring to write a book about ignorantly wandering around a country, being corrected by the locals. I guess an Ivy League education doesn’t go as far as it used to.
2. Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley
   • A surprising, playful book of sci-fi short stories. NYRB Classics rescuing another under-heralded author from obscurity.
3. Hiroshima in America by Robert Jay Liston & Greg Mitchell
   • A really interesting look at how Truman and others understood the power of the bomb, and how they tailored their self-image to justify it in retrospect. Also goes into details of the 50th anniversary exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian, and the ferocity that right-wingers and veterans groups showed at anyone who would question their self-delusions about the necessity for killing tens of thousands of civilians.
4. Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald
   • An argument that continued intervention in Vietnam would be unsuccessful, written from an anthropological view while the war was still ongoing (1972). Interesting as a corrective on some American illusions about the war, but I would recommend skipping it and going straight to Young’s The Vietnam Wars (further down this list).
5. Bomb Power by Garry Wills
   • There’s an interesting book to be written here about how the nuclear bomb and project to build it helped give rise to the post-WW II world order and organization of the federal government. But Wills’ project is a little more narrow (and misleading for the title): examining how secrecy procedures developed during the Manhattan Project became a useful tool for all sorts of government work, and a way to expand executive branch power. Read Kaplan’s The Bomb and Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine before you bother with this one.
6. The Bitter Road to Freedom by William L. Hitchcock
   • The liberation of Europe from the Nazi war machine was a bloody affair, and WW II histories usually focus on the battles more than the civilian aftermath. Hitchcock’s account here brings some attention back to the effects on those not fighting, and how the Allies were fighting mass starvation just as much as enemy soldiers. Cities were ground into dust by artillery bombardments, and mass amounts of refugees had to be returned or resettled after hostilities ended.
7. The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
   • There’s a fig leaf that conservatives have leaned on recently in discussing discrimination: making a distinction between de jure segregation vs de facto segregation, and then throwing their hands up at the latter as not eligible for government remedy. Rothstein here aims to blow up the distinction by pointing out all the ways government aided segregation through zoning, builder subsidies for segregated communities.and more. It’s a necessary but also somewhat silly book, since it labors under the illusion that Federalist Society judges won’t just change their reasoning to a different justification.
8. Necronomicon by Alan Moore & Jane Burrows
   • Moore doing a pastiche/take on Lovecraft, unearthing some of the base impulses that went into HP’s work. Pretty good, and planning to read his followup Providence.
9. Gambling with Armageddon by Martin L. Sherwin
   • Fantastic book—not just on the Cuban Missile Crisis, but also on the decision-making processes within the Kennedy Administration. Sherwin does a fine day-by-day read of how the crisis developed, and just how much admin officials struggled to wrap their heads around the situation and their options. Just amazing how much they defaulted to preferring air strikes, and the number of times they ignored or forgot contrary evidence and arguments. Sherwin’s final book before his death just recently, and a masterpiece of analysis.
10. LA Confidential by James Ellroy
    • Far bigger and stranger than the excellent film adaptation, enough that even on a re-read I was surprised by the scope. Ellroy’s one of our great American novelists, and American Tabloid my pick for the Great American Novel.
11. Tomorrow the World by Stephen Wertheim
    • Works through the pivot of how American policy-makers changed their mindset to the global power-projection that’s been the rule after WW II. Good at emphasizing how great a shift it was, and how much it was driven by initial fears of Nazis ruling Europe (which would necessitate the US controlling the rest of the world to economically match them).
12. Raven Rock by Garrett M. Graff
    • Good look at the very elaborate but also somewhat silly plans to protect the government in times of nuclear war. Graff juggles a chronological history with deeper dives into the various facilities very well, including a chapter on how 9/11 tested how the plans would work under much less severe emergency circumstances. The upshot: “continuity of government” plans often prevent “continuity of governance,” as the process of shuttling them to safe facilities takes them out of the decision-making loop at the very moment they need to be in it the most. Even with advance warning, it seems like the best solution is to shuttle technocratic lower-level officials to the secure facilities—just in case—and leave everyone else in Washington.
13. Ike’s Bluff by Evan Thomas
    • A mostly-hagiographic account of Eisenhower’s foreign policy work as president. Thomas is trying to push back on the idea of Ike as an absentee president, instead arguing that his bland and confusing answers at press conferences were a deliberate ruse to avoid revealing information. He’s right, but that doesn’t make them any better! Less convincing is Thomas arguing that Eisenhower was bluffing everyone—even his own staff—when he advocated for using nuclear weapons in public and private statements. His goal was ultimately to save money on the military by leaning on nuclear weapons and CIA subterfuge to do the job more cheaply, but by feeding the anti-communist rhetoric within his own party he ruined a bunch of careers and managed to expand the military budget anyways. Sad!
14. America’s Cold War (2nd ed) by Campbell Craig & Fredrik Logevall
    • The best single book I’ve read so far on the Cold War. Craig and Logevall argue that domestic politics drove Cold War actions far more than traditional histories admit, and make their case well. Concise, well-written, insightful, and far, far better than the Gaddis Cold War book I read later.
15. The Vietnam War: A Concise International History by Mark Atwood Lawrence
    • A slim, recent look at the Vietnam War. Too short and neutral to be very insightful. Read Young’s The Vietnam Wars!